Fresh old advice

Indignity Vol. 4, No. 149

Tom Scocca

28 Aug 2024 — 24 min read

ASK THE SOPHIST

Welcome to the Ask The Sophist Archive!

THROUGH MULTIPLE PUBLISHING arrangements, titles, and business models, the creators of Indignity have been offering our readers the advice column known as Ask The Sophist. Other advice columnists are there to tell you what you ought to do—The Sophist is here to tell you why you're right to do what you want to do. But The Sophist can't help you unless you ask.

As a service to our readers, and in the hopes of inspiring more questions to The Sophist, and because we mistakenly thought it would be quick to do, Indignity has compiled, for the first time, an Ask The Sophist archive. Across several inconsistent naming schemes, drawing on text only findable through email searches, we have collected what we hope is (but do not guarantee to be) a complete set of The Sophist's work.

Look at all these problems people have had—which turned out, on inspection, not to be problems at all! Wouldn't you like to have your own problem resolved so neatly? Send your questions to Ask The Sophist at indignity@indignity.net.

Can I Punish the College Newspaper Columnist Who Used to Get on My Nerves?

April 16, 2024

It's not as if you came to The Sophist with a dossier of phone-camera jpegs of the goods. If you went to the campus library, you could pull up the columns, but you didn't and you haven't. You're not asking what to do about the columns; you're asking about what to do about your memory of the columns.

Can I Feign Illness to Avoid My So-Called Friend?

April 9, 2024

Whose company do you find so intolerable that you've come up with this scheme of faking illness to get out of it? Your own. You are the person who said "yes" (or said "probably") to hanging out with someone you don't really like, someone you see as embarrassingly needy and "a bit thick." Some version of yourself, last week, decided that was how your this-week self should spend their time.

Are You Allowed to Make Up Fake Letters to Advice Columns?

January 24, 2024

The Sophist believes that nothing is more entertaining than the truth. But something is more entertaining than nothing. As it happens, your question—or something close enough to it for The Sophist’s purposes—was featured in the very first edition of Ask The Sophist, as the second letter in the column.

How Do I Cope With Being Blocked on Bluesky?

November 17, 2023

Bluesky is small and relatively friendly at the moment, because it's still in invitation-only closed beta. But that doesn't mean it's set on easy mode! The site took off, to the extent it has taken off, as a refuge for the incurable veteran posters who couldn't stand Twitter anymore. The Bluesky power users are people who have seen things you wouldn't believe: fandom swarms burning off the shoulder of Orion, glittering threat emails from Bret Stephens, crab Rangoon, things of that nature.

Why Does Your Husband Talk Funny When He's Drinking?

September 18, 2023

In any restaurant, with any server, the goal in ordering is to get it done with as little confusion and awkwardness as possible. The question of whether an attempt to cross the language line is a good or bad idea is entirely contextual. For starters, for context: Where, and from whom, is her husband ordering this beer? From a newly immigrated waiter in a place with dishes listed in Sharpie on untranslated colored-paper signs tacked to the wall? From a high school student working a part-time job at a mass-market Chinese restaurant in a mall? From a bartender just trying to stay on top of a menu of dozens of Beers of the World?

Can I Cheat Death by Skipping My Next Booster?

September 6, 2023

You're focused on your booster because the timing—shot in October, breathing crisis in November—seemed overwhelmingly salient and obvious to you. The Sophist absolutely understands this logic. No matter how many experts The Sophist hears talking about the hours of lag time between eating tainted food and getting food poisoning, The Sophist knows that every time The Sophist has had food poisoning, it's begun with the appetite cratering in the middle of a meal, and The Sophist will never stop blaming those meals.

Can I Be in Love With My Friend, Please?

January 4, 2023

The trouble here is that people use the word "love" for two quite different things—well, a lot more than two, but here we're going to focus on the two. One of these, probably the more popular one, is kind of perniciously empty? There's love as a collaborative relationship between two people (within certain allowances, naturally, for the fundamental unknowability of one human being to another) and but then there's the love that so many of the singers sing love songs about, where they say they're "in love with" someone but what they mean is more like "in love at" someone.

Is It Fair to Run Up the Football Score Against Outnumbered Eight-Year-Olds?

October 20, 2022

One way of learning to deal with adversity, though, is by learning when to say "To hell with this." Persistence is nice—essential! priceless!—but there are other things your kid needs to master in life, too. Such as how to recognize when something is bullshit, and how to get out of it accordingly.

Is It Cool for Me to Rock Out?

September 14, 2022

The Sophist notes the slight temporal fogging in your note when you describe a time that you were "younger," when you considered yourself too cool for Dire Straits. Maybe that's where you want to remember yourself as being, culturally: the age when you started learning to play guitar, as some older sort of younger person, who had learned a few things about the world. But if that were the whole story, you'd have no reason to play that guitar lick at all. You want to play it because somewhere, sometime, in the honest personal history of your childhood or adolescence, you heard it come lashing out of that slow-gathering echoey intro, on normal mainstream hit radio, and it moved you.

Can I Escape My Winery Getaway?

April 5, 2022

Whatever friction and anticipatory remorse you're currently imagining would rear up that much uglier when you're day-drunk at a winery brunch with the girlfriend who made you skip your child's soccer game. The winery option will be around forever; that's why they put wineries in Viagra ads. Childhood, meanwhile, is ticking away even faster than you can imagine.

Is It Wrong to Cash In on Gambling App Promotions?

December 31, 2021

In that aggregate you're fretting about, you are a lone figure in the ones column of some very large number, if that number is even audited for public consumption. You're a rounding error. If you weren't, the companies couldn't afford to be as generous as they are with the play credits.

Why Won't Someone Write Me a Takedown Review of Ross Douthat's Tick-Bite Memoir?

November 15, 2021

Here was where a lifetime of deflection and evasion had taken Douthat—from his baptism into the conservative intellectual movement via a late-night all-male nude swim off William F. Buckley's yacht, through his Harvard-credentialed memoir about despising Harvard, to the New York Times, where he can twit the readership about liberal closed-mindedness from one of the opinion section's protected affirmative-action seats for conservatives. He has been an heir of the WASP ruling class claiming the oppressed status of an outsider Catholic; he has been a critic of overweening progressive sanctimony who stays cagey about what political morality he would impose in its place if he could. He has been a man of faith sharing the pope's dismay at the hollowness and cruelty of secular 21st century life, right up until the pope starts talking about unchecked capitalism.

May I Stop Working on My Unappealing Sentences?

August 31, 2021

Once you sit down to turn the story concept in your mind into a written piece of fiction, you quickly discover that you need to do inelegant things like getting your characters from one side of the room to the other. Once you start converting an argument your inner voice has rehearsed into a written piece of nonfiction, you keep needing to find a verifiable fact that correctly illustrates one idea and attaches it to the next. It's work—work that The Sophist, personally, spends as much time as possible avoiding.

Is My Book Too Boring?

April 2, 2021

Here is a central truth about being an author, which your literary contact has, in his own harsh way, helpfully demonstrated: your book is immensely important to you, in a way that it is not, and cannot be, to anyone who works in the publishing industry. If your manuscript is your baby, you must imagine even the nicest, most helpful person you meet in publishing as a daycare operator dealing with 59 other kids across three classrooms. For you, the manuscript is the whole focus of your time and creativity; for him, it is one stack of papers in a whole stack of other stacks of papers that he has to deal with today, before more stacks arrive tomorrow.

May I Keep Adding Books to My Huge Collection of Books?

February 16, 2021

Two shelves down is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask / A Link to the Past: Legendary Edition, displayed in a place of honor. I have not read this book, but its owner has. On the shelf in between is a three-volume set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a richly decorated 1946 edition from The Heritage Press. When I take Volume One out of its individual slipcase and open it, I can smell the particular smell of my late father's bookcases. There are two strips of torn-off blue-lined memo-pad paper tucked in it, one shortly after the beginning of the text proper, the other up at page 446, "Italy Under Maximian and Severus." The latter, I think, marks my own deepest run into Gibbon, sometime in the 1990s. But I can get back to it right now and keep going, just as soon as I finish with—what was the question again?

How Much Should I Blame My Friend for Jumping the Vaccination Line?

February 9, 2021

In uncertain times, you take certainty where you can find it. These issues of priority and supply should have been hashed out by government officials and presented to the public with clarity and urgency, not hashed out in your group text, among hundreds of other equally frustrated and resentful group texts.

Should I Skip a Family Funeral to Avoid My Toxic Trumpy Relations?

February 2, 2021

By not showing up, you would be granting the MAGA faction control over your most private sphere, and you would be ceding them the high ground. You would be sending them a signal, and the signal would be that the reason you don't talk to them is that you are some sort of weird hermit who doesn't care about family—that the problem is yours, not theirs.

It's Fine to Throw Away My Dog's Poop in Other People's Trash Cans, Right?

December 29, 2020

You and your friend have staked out what you take to be different moral or ethical positions, but which sound—from over here on the West Side—as if they are simply different geographical positions. If my apartment allowed dogs, and I were to take one for a walk in my neighborhood, I cannot clearly picture where I might find someone else's private garbage can to throw the poop into. There are the public sidewalk cans, and there are the looming walls of garbage bags laid out on the sidewalk by the apartment buildings, and...what would I even do, hop the railing outside someone's townhouse on a cross street to search for wherever they might keep a trash can?

Don't I Deserve a Refund for Quitting My Profession?

September 22, 2020

The money is a distraction. At most it represents the symbolic desire to undo your commitment to this line of work you now despise—to literally make them pay. Before you do anything about the question, The Sophist recommends you get yourself a set of paper coin wrappers, the good kind with the rolled rim at the bottom so they hold their shape and the coins don't slide through. Dump out your jar or cup or bucket of old change, sort it out, and wrap it up. Clear your mind of all thoughts but "dime two three four five six seven eight nine TEN...penny two three four five six seven eight nine TEN..." and "Nickels, huh, worst coin of all."

How Long Should the Mailing List Be for My Baby Announcement?

September 8, 2020

People tend to automatically calibrate their response to baby news to fit the situation, so the same announcement that might stir a great-aunt into excitement and delight will make someone you know from two jobs ago say “Oh, that's nice” and shrug and immediately forget about your baby.

Does It Make Sense to Feel Bad When the Cops Are Nice to Me?

September 1, 2020

So: the human race. Not all bastards are cops. Are all cops bastards? A central failure of Americans' self-understanding is the belief that bad people are constantly, identifiably bad—that the monstrous social forces we live with are the work of individuals who go around being obvious monsters all the time. But inequity and injustice aren't generalized misery or cruelty; they're discrimination. Jim Crow was the handiwork of white people who were fathers, grandmothers, church deacons, warm and welcoming diner waitresses—until an innocent person of the wrong type walked through the door. The groping, predatory bosses who terrorize young women can be wise mentors to young men, and respectful pals to the women in their professional peer group.

When Is the Right Time to Blow My Nose in the Restroom?

August 25, 2020

You could work yourself into some sort of tizzy about cross-contamination scenarios if you wanted to, but the coronavirus pandemic has upended our basic premises about which bodily productions are more unclean than the others. What if, despite your use of a tissue to blow your nose, your dangerous respiratory droplets fall or get transferred by hand onto your otherwise blameless genitals? But, really, what if?

Should I Stop the University From Paying Me Too Much Money?

August 10, 2020

If your university—or rather, in a crucial distinction, the university you are doing contract work for—resembles other American institutions of higher education, it possesses an ever-expanding and wildly overpaid top layer of employees known as "administrators," giving orders to an ever-more insecure array of contingent and contract workers, whose operations are supposed to be supported by an austerity-depleted scaffolding of staff whose labor is classified as "administrative." Once these people, who held the whole operation together, were probably called "secretaries"; now they may be called "administrative assistants" or something else. What matters here is that their numbers have been cut back year after year, and their responsibilities simultaneously extended and thinned out, until it's not possible for them to do all the things they used to do and it's not possible for anyone else to do them either.

Do I Have to Buy My Pals Weed With My Medical Weed Card?

August 3, 2020

Despite your sympathy toward them, you and your friends are approaching the unsettled weed question from slightly yet importantly different positions. Your friends are caught between being socially permitted to use weed and being legally forbidden to buy it. You are caught between being legally permitted to buy weed and being legally forbidden to resell it. Your friends, "with it" as they may feel, are trailing behind you on history's forward march, and they are a drag on your own progress, and also your back treatment.

Do My Vacation Plans Violate Quarantine?

July 28, 2020

Obviously, it should be best to stay put completely. But prudence and sanity, like children confined to a two-bedroom apartment from winter through the height of summer, eventually start scuffling with each other under the strain of indefinite lockdown. So you plan out an escape: a carefully circumscribed escape, with a healthy change of scenery. You're not saying "screw it" and going mouth-to-mouth with maskless strangers at the foot of an ice luge. You're following the time-honored plague-era tradition of getting away from everyone, fleeing the miasmic crowds for the clean and rejuvenating embrace of nature.

Must I Mail Back This Free Shirt I Don't Want?

July 21, 2020

J. Crew is not merely "in financial trouble"—it's in bankruptcy protection. At the moment, it is not even an overpriced preppy clothing business, but a meta-business whose purpose is to rearrange the assets and debts accumulated in the past process of selling overpriced preppie clothes, so that someday it may go back to selling overpriced preppie clothes. This may have had something to do with its inability to send you the shirt on time (though that may also have been a result of the ongoing sabotage of the Postal Service).

Was It Wrong to Hire Movers During a Pandemic?

July 14, 2020

Individual choice stops being a useful framework when you can't plausibly know what the options are. What would the alternative to moving have been? Canceling your own home sale, at the expense of the people who were counting on moving into your old house? Freezing the whole process for two months, or four months, or six months, or until there's a vaccine—as if the government's efforts to control and overcome the virus were a predictable progression you could write a schedule around, rather than an ever-worsening series of disasters?

Would You Be Interested in Featuring a Link to My Article in Your Content?

July 7, 2020

As we reached the foot of the long flight of stairs down to the riverbank, a briny, tide-pool sort of smell greeted us. My eight-year-old said it smelled "salty," and for a moment the odor had a certain appeal, as if the Hudson—which is really an estuary at this point—truly was connected to the whole alive and aromatic ocean. Then the smell got stronger and less attractive with every step. We reached the big rocks piled along the shore and began to walk along them, and I looked out at the water and saw a pale dead fish, its body partly torn or rotted away, floating there.

Should I Bill My Absent Roommates for the Utilities?

June 30, 2020

Your plan is, as you admit, a little bit of a stretch. The baseline springtime power bills are fine—you are keeping the fridge and freezer running for them, so that their limoncello stays nice and cold and their Eggos don’t spoil, against the day they need them again. But now you are asking them to cover the cost of cold air that they are not personally benefiting from, and at Con Edison rates.

Can I Leave My Clothesline Hanging Up Here in a Foreign Land?

June 23, 2020

In your mind, you have already made a unilateral concession to your neighbors, and this neighbor doesn't even have the decency to appreciate it. Why should she? Look at how your neighbor approached you, without apology or indirection. What you see as politeness and deference, she sees as weakness and laziness. And she correctly sees your current course of action as a seizure of communal territory, even though you chose to seize the least desirable portion.

What If I Don't Want to Get Back to Normal?

June 16, 2020

You want to not get over this. But the country has gotten over many, many things. Kent State. Fred Hampton. Tulsa. We talk about tomorrow like it could be some promised land, but tomorrow is just another today you haven't started slogging through yet. A day will come when you catch yourself worrying again about whether someone is judging the suitability of your mothering habits or your career achievements—and honestly some of them really will be judging you, albeit in a totally fragmented and incoherent way. It was always nonsense, and now you know for certain it's nonsense. You want to keep seeing past the nonsense.

Can I Get Mad That They Made Me Donate to My Boss' Flood-Repair Fund?

June 9, 2020

Now that you've felt those valid and true feelings, you want to know what comes next. Don't try to take the long view—the long view is guesswork at this point. (But if you must, spend another hundred bucks getting yourself a go bag, a machete, and a hoard of airplane liquor bottles as currency and disinfectant in the Times to Come.) Focus instead on the medium view: Mark and Matt are at least as endangered as you are. The entire workplace power dynamic is a contingent fiction that may give way at any moment. Once you're all scattered and rolling around on the concrete floor, who will even remember which cogs went where in the broken machine?

Should I Worry That the Kids Don't Laugh at My Jokes?

June 2, 2020

As an adult zinger-flinger, especially of the dry variety, you are presumably well aware of how to triage your jokes for your listeners. If you're honestly funny (as we grant you are) you don't even have to think about it. The nervous new junior hire doesn't get the same treatment as the coworker who's been through two rounds of layoffs with you; you know the sales staff gets nervous about gallows humor. So: You make a witty remark, and a young person looks at you blankly—and you keep on making witty remarks to young people.

Can I Get Away With Skipping My Column This Week?

May 26, 2020

Spring is blooming into summer and the world is going up in flames. Under the circumstances, your gesture of concern about not doing the work is tantamount to doing the work. Mix yourself a Spaghett and call this week a success.

Was I Wrong to Steal a Beer Sign From a Defunct Convenience Store?

May 19, 2020

It is not possible for anyone to steal Mr. Boh, because it is not possible to own Mr. Boh. He is a folk hero, the cultural commons, who belongs to everyone who believes in him. He survived the end of his own brewery plant and of the entire National Brewing Company, living on in the hearts of the people of his city, even when it seemed there might be no more beer for him to adorn the cans of.

What If I Cash My Late Relative's Stimulus Check?

May 12, 2020

It is a very small amount of money, from the government's point of view. If it's the full $1,200 stimulus, and you were to give it back to the president, and I just did the math right, he could spend it on adding a little less than four inches to the length of his border wall—insignificant, yet also evil. Much better to spend the money on good times, in the memory of your lost loved one, who was still here for part of this tax year, after all.

Got something you need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Please send your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, August 27, 2024

★★★ Blinds raised to wake the logy younger child revealed the fig plant backlit and glowing green. Over on the Park Avenue median the begonias were backlit too, on the uptown side of each intersection. Cool air currents moved in no particular direction in the shade of the East 50s. Uptown, among the lower buildings, the sun's warmth had the advantage. Rose hips were reddening along the path down toward the Pool. Sun was baking the moisture out of the Park, raising a smell like old manure. Three and a half hours later, the sun had lowered to be dazzling rather than scorching, and the breezes had cohered into something that rustled in the trees and comforted the body.

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SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The Swedish, French, American Cook Book, by Mrs. Maria Mathilda Ericsson Hammond, published in 1918, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

Brown Bread–and–Butter Sandwiches (Sandwiches de Tar tines)

Butter white bread and put a slice of brown bread on top. Cut in triangle shape. Place on a paper doily, one resting on the other, showing one white and one brown alternately. Garnish with parsley. Serve for afternoon tea or with entree for luncheon or dinner.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.

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